Alexander Pushkin

More of the Morose

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Last week, I wrote about some of literature’s comedic or part-comedic novels. This week, I’ll flip that to discuss some of the saddest novels. Given that I covered this topic in a post eight years ago, I’ll focus on novels I’ve read since then — whether those books were published before or after 2018.

Of course, sad novels are not always 100% bleak; they perhaps contain some happier moments and/or semi-optimistic endings. But they’re downbeat overall.

Kristin Hannah’s excellent fiction can certainly leave a reader shaken. For instance, her 1970s-set novel The Great Alone (2018) is a depressing look at a Vietnam War veteran living in the Alaskan wilderness and how his post-traumatic stress wreaks havoc on himself, his wife, and their teen daughter.

Elin Hilderbrand’s also-excellent fiction is considered somewhat “lighter” than Hannah’s, but she does often wrestle with major personal and societal issues. One of Hilderbrand’s more melancholy novels is 28 Summers (2020), about a cancer-stricken woman who had a longtime one-weekend-a-year affair with her soulmate while she and him lived separate family lives the rest of the time. A superb book amid the sorrow.

In-between the two above novels arrived Colson Whitehead’s partly 1960s-set The Nickel Boys (2019), a heartbreaking look at abuse in a Florida reform school and at racism in general. Whitehead’s earlier The Underground Railroad (2016) — which unfolds in 19th-century slavery times — is another very good novel that will leave readers morose. Both Whitehead books won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Barbara Kingsolver’s later Pulitzer winner Demon Copperhead isn’t all dispiriting, but the scourge of opioid addiction and the poverty depicted in the 2022 novel leave readers dejected even as they’re impressed with the author’s modern reimagining of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield.

Moving to some older novels I’ve read since 2018, we have Michael Crichton’s 1990 sci-fi thriller Jurassic Park in which the hubris of using DNA to recreate living dinosaurs in the 20th century results in lots of destruction by those out-of-their-element dinos.

Twenty-five years earlier, there was John Edward Williams’ 1965 Stoner novel about a farm-raised boy who becomes an English professor but lives a personal life marked by an unhappy marriage and other disappointments. Again, a really good novel amid the sorrow.

Another 1965 release was James Leo Herlihy’s Midnight Cowboy (better known for the 1969 movie adaptation) about a naive Texan’s odyssey in New York City and the discouraging experiences of he and his down-and-out, ill-fated friend.

In 1957 came Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, about Australians waiting to die from a deadly wave of nuclear war-caused radiation heading their way. Almost any apocalyptic/dystopian novel would be eligible for this post.

Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912) is exquisitely written and set in one of the most beautiful cities on the planet, but the plot is full of unrequited obsession — and then comes the cholera outbreak.

In 1833, Alexander Pushkin’s novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin was published after appearing in serial form between 1825 and 1832. A depressingly brilliant work filled with boredom, arrogance, selfishness, an ill-fated duel, a missed romantic opportunity, and more.

Among the sad novels I mentioned in my 2018 post were Andre Dubus III’s House of Sand and Fog (1999), Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958), Erich Maria Remarque’s Spark of Life (1952), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), Emile Zola’s Germinal (1885), George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), and Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (1819).

Your thoughts on this post, and examples of sad novels you’ve read?

Misty the cat says: “I was gonna give Dave this tree for his birthday but it’s stuck in the ground.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a VERY close budget referendum and a not-close but controversial development decision — is here.

Restrictions Need Not Cause Conniptions

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Credit: Random House

Authors dealing with restrictions can find their literary creativity stifled or stimulated. This post will discuss several examples of the latter.

Some fiction fans know the story behind the iconic Green Eggs and Ham. Dr. Seuss was challenged to do a children’s book containing a maximum of 50 different words (albeit all of which could be used more than once). The author struggled with that parameter, but eventually created what has been an enduring bestseller since 1960.

Moving to adult novels, Margaret Atwood was asked to write a book retelling a classic myth of her choosing — so the Canadian author obviously had a limitation on subject matter. She decided to do a feminist take on Homer’s Odyssey, focusing on Odysseus’ wife Penelope and other women. The result was 2005’s The Penelopiad. Not one of Atwood’s most compelling novels, but worth reading.

Another way of working within a framework is writing a novel in verse. Such was the case with Eugene Onegin (1833) by Russian author Alexander Pushkin, whose titular protagonist is a young, selfish, arrogant dandy. While one wouldn’t expect an all-poetry work to be as gripping as a more traditional prose novel, Eugene Onegin holds one’s interest and then some.

Russian-turned-American author Vladimir Nabokov also gave himself a challenge with Pale Fire (1962), which contains a lengthy poem along with prose. A brilliant novel, but not exactly a warm novel — despite having fire in its title. 🙂

Then there are novels written in countries ruled by dictatorial regimes, meaning that if the authors want to satirize said regimes they need to be indirect and allegorical to try avoid possible prison or death. One example is The Master and Margarita, a rollicking novel that Mikhail Bulgakov wrote between 1928 and 1940 in the Stalin-led Soviet Union.

There are also the creative restrictions involved with co-authoring a novel, because it’s not “the baby” of just the usual solo writer. Among such books is 1873’s The Gilded Age by Charles Dudley Warner and Mark Twain. Each man mostly wrote separate chapters, though they reportedly jointly penned a few. The result was an awkward fit; one could tell that the satirical chapters were Twain’s, although Warner’s serious/more-conventional sections weren’t bad.

Finally, I recently read Past Lying (2023), the seventh installment of Scottish author Val McDermid’s series starring cold-case detective Karen Pirie. McDermid imposed restrictions of a sort on herself by setting the novel during 2020’s Covid lockdown, which gave Pirie and her police colleagues quite a logistical challenge investigating a twisty case of murder committed by a crime author. But McDermid pulled it off; I think Past Lying is the best of the Pirie series.

Any comments about, and/or examples of, this topic?

Many thanks to “The Introverted Bookworm” — talented blogger/author Ada Jenkins — for the wonderful review of my 2017 literary-trivia book she posted this past Tuesday, May 27. Very, very appreciated! 🙂

Book Review: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time: The Book Lover’s Guide to Literary Trivia by Dave Astor

Misty the cat says: “Every cat needs a vacation home.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of the aforementioned 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about Memorial Day, a local food pantry, and more — is here.

Russian Fiction Is Much Better Than Trump’s Diction

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With the corrupt Trump administration’s ties to Russia all over the news, I’d like to offer a different Russia-related topic this week: Russian literature.

Which includes an amazing array of dark/compelling/unforgettable fiction, particularly in the 19th century. Even Trump would be impressed reading Crime and Punishment — as long as Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel was shortened to a one-paragraph memo.

Crime and Punishment is my favorite Russian novel, and one of my favorites from any country. Riveting, feverish, psychological (it was said to have influenced Sigmund Freud). The high points of The Brothers Karamazov may be even better, but there are some slog-through pages and chapters that the never-a-dull-moment Crime and Punishment doesn’t suffer from. Dostoyevsky reportedly planned to make The Brothers Karamazov the first of a trilogy, but death intervened.

There are several other Dostoyevsky works well worth discussing, so please have at it in the comments section! But now I’ll turn to Leo Tolstoy, whose War and Peace and Anna Karenina are as famous as novels can be. I was impressed with those two classics (though I’m more a fan of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov) as well as with several of Tolstoy’s magnificent short stories, some almost novella length. “The Kreutzer Sonata,” “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” “Master and Man” — wow!

Speaking of short stories, you can’t go wrong with Tolstoy’s pal Anton Chekhov. A pioneering writer of tales that are more character-oriented and human-emotion-focused than plot-oriented, plus Chekhov of course was also a master playwright.

Earlier-in-the-19th-century Russian authors can also knock your socks off (though I wouldn’t advise that during a Moscow or St. Petersburg winter). Alexander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter novel is among that writer’s great reads, as is Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls novel and his “The Overcoat” short story. Dostoyevsky contemporary Ivan Turgenev also wrote some really good novels, including Fathers and Sons.

Moving near/into the 20th century (experienced by the 1910-deceased Tolstoy for a decade), we have socialist-realist writers such as Maxim Gorky and Nikolai Ostrovsky. The latter’s How the Steel Was Tempered (a novel I purchased during a 1980s trip to Russia) is quite gripping for a while before getting a bit tedious.

Then there was Boris Pasternak, whose Doctor Zhivago novel drew the ire of Soviet officials despite it being somewhat nuanced about socialism; and the dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was adept at both fiction and nonfiction (and the subject of this “Mother Russia” song by Renaissance). I’m not fond of the way Solzhenitsyn’s politics turned very right-wing, but he did go through imprisonment hell.

Renaissance has a lead female singer and a female lyricist, but Russian literature (unlike fiction from a number of other nations) has been dominated by men. Unfortunately, lots of patriarchy, machismo, and sexism in that country — which might be one reason why Trump is so attracted to Putin and Russia’s oligarchs.

Russia’s history of authoritarianism and oppression certainly has had an effect on its writers, as has that country’s politics, poverty, income inequality, geographic size, high rate of alcoholism, aforementioned machismo, and huge war casualties — including the carnage resulting from Napoleon’s and Hitler’s invasions. But the most famous Russian writers would most likely be literary geniuses no matter where they had lived.

Obviously I’ve left some writers out, so please fill in some of those blanks in your comments. Who are your favorite Russian authors, either ones I mentioned or didn’t mention?

Here’s a review of, and a video interview about, my new literary-trivia book Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column for Baristanet.com, which covers Montclair, N.J., and nearby towns. The latest weekly column — set in the year 4034 AD! — is here.